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Hi All! Just wanted to write a few words about why the site and some services such as OCS in Second Life have been flaky the past couple of days.

Our web server had a bit of a problem yesterday (Monday, July 15) that took approximately 10 hours to resolve and get everything back up and running again. This took down both the site and services, unfortunately. We are also working on migrating the current site to new software, so there may be periods of time where the webpages are not accessible, but services (such as OCS) remain functioning normally.

Sorry for any inconvenience or confusion, and thank you for your patience and understanding.

The latest update to the main grid servers has caused a bit of an issue with a long-used function, namely llApplyRotationalImpulse. This is a function I use for such things as shell casings on eject to give them a little bit of random spin. The error has no effect on the function of products, it just produces these annoying error messages. LL should be fixing this in a server update. Should they choose to sit on it, I'll be updating everything that uses it (which is a lot of stuff) in the near future. Many thanks for your future patience. :)

If you'd like to view the JIRA on it, and hey, throw in your votes for LL to fix it pronto, the JIRA issue is here: SCR-372

As you may have heard, Second Life has taken polygon mesh modelling out of beta and spread it far and wide across the main production grid. Huzzah! We at TOC have been waiting for this for what feels like forever. So, I wanted to take a moment and keep you all up to date on what we're up to.

First and foremost, we have imminent mesh releases for not one, but two brand new products. Beta testing is starting on these, and if the debugging gods smile kindly upon us, the first should be released in a couple of weeks.

Second, I have been fielding some questions about updating the existing product line to mesh models. The answer to this is nuanced, so read it twice. For most models, converting to mesh provides no real benefit in aesthetics or functionality. However, I would like to go back and remodel those what I feel would benefit from the capabilities of mesh. Rebuilding these models in mesh is going to take a bit of work and time, and I'm allergic to doing work with no hope of ever being compensated for it. Current thinking is that for models that are simply updated to mesh (i.e. not re-scripted and basically rebuilt from scratch) is to provide them to existing owners on a "Pay what you like" basis, in the hope that this will satisfy both customers' perception of value, and my perception of compensation for effort.

And now the bad news. Sorry to all you older viewer users, but mesh requires a viewer that supports mesh, which at the time of this writing, means either the official Second Life viewer version 3.0 or the Firestorm viewer which has also added mesh support (though not upload) with its latest release. Currently, I'm using Firestorm because I'm stuck in my ways and like the additional features, familiar UI feel and mix of some of the better ideas from Viewer 3.

First, thank you for making the 2011 Spring Sale our highest grossing sale ever. It's always great to see that kind of enthusiasm. :) Several people asked if we could hold the sale price on some things for a few days, which we've always been happy to do, and it gave us some inspiration to do something a little different.

As a bit of an experiment, for the next few weeks at our main store in Second Life®, we're going to be discounting individual items for 24 hours only. We won't be announcing which are being discounted, and when the 24 hours is over, it will revert to its normal price. The items on sale will have a sale spinner over them that looks like the one you see here.

Again, thank you, and if you were hoping to catch something on sale... Keep checking in. :)